If you are following the Olympics, then one of the names you probably have heard is Lolo Jones.  She is trying to go for the gold medal in the 100M Hurdles this year.  After hitting a hurdle in Beijing and failing to place in 2008, she has been fine-tuning her workouts to culminate during these Olympics.  Besides her cool name, let’s be honest she is fairly easy on the eyes so she garners a lot of attention.

Since I really don’t know much about these athletes until the games arrived, I will fill you in on what I learned about Lolo Jones.  She is originally from Iowa, but now resides in Baton Rouge where she attended college at LSU (being a Buckeye fan I won’t hold that against her).  She turned 30 years old during these Olympic games.  She also was an 11 time All-American and holds numerous indoor and outdoor titles.  Too many to list here.  But you can read all about her at her website http://runlolorun.com.

What does an Olympic hurdler like Lolo Jones do for a workout routine?

I watched a couple interviews with Lolo and the first thing she mentioned is that she lifts weights every day except Friday and Sunday.  Sunday, she doesn’t do anything, not even track work.  I’m assuming the main reason is to allow the body to rest and recover from the grueling workouts for the past week.

It was tough to find a lot of items that Lolo does during her workout, but core work was a big part of it.  The core needs to be strong and powerful, especially in the hurdles.  It needs to help pull that leg up over the hurdle and keep your body in proper position throughout the whole race so that the other muscle groups are able to do their thing.  If the core is weak and starts breaking down, your body will have a tough time with the proper mechanics, and you have to work that much harder to get over the hurdles.  Thus, the overall result will be a slower time.

I did watch a video of Lolo doing power cleans in a workout.  Now, I felt her technique was a little rough and that could be more efficient, but the exercise itself is very important for sprinters.  Cleans are a total body movement.  They help with power and explosion.  You have to lift a lot of weight, very quickly.  This is the type of movement that sprinters need to develop, because, well, sprinters have to run fast and move quick.

There are different versions of the clean, but the two most popular are the hang clean and the power clean.  I do a mixture of both with my athletes, but for a sprinter, I would probably spend more time with the power cleans.  Why?  Because power cleans you start from the floor and the position is kind of similar to the position you would take coming out of the blocks.  I know it isn’t exactly alike, but the hip extension and power you are developing with the cleans is definitely transferrable to the hip extension and power you need firing out of the blocks.

Cleans aren’t an exercise that you can teach overnight.  It takes a great weightlifting coach to explain the fundamentals and then countless repetitions fine-tuning your technique.  I was lucky.  I went to the Columbus Weightlifting Club and was taught by Mark Canella, who is the coach for Olympic hopeful Holley Mangold.  So, I guess you can say I was taught by an Olympic coach.

There was also a video of Lolo Jones showing how inflexible she is.  Shocking, I know.

I found this a little interesting.  She sat on the floor with her legs straight out and could not touch her toes.  She was a good inch or two away from them.  Most sprinters and hurdlers are flexible or at least work on the flexibility more so that injuries can be prevented.  Also they want to be able to move their body parts in the greatest range of motion possible.  Being inflexible limits that range of motion.

But hey, I’m not going to criticize.  She is the best at what she does and if it has worked thus far, then if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it.  I’m sure she does what she can to improve her flexibility or at least not get it worse.

When I train athletes to run faster, it is to improve their speed in game situations.  I’m really not an expert as a track coach, periodizing track workouts to get sprinters peaked for a particular meet.  So I can only make an educated guess on her track work.  My though is that she does a lot of sprint work for her speed development, but has to spend an equal amount of time on technique.  From what I recall talking with hurdlers I knew back in the day, it is almost a rhythmic pace you go through when you run the hurdles.  They run the same amount of steps inbetween each hurdle.  If that gets messed up, they’re done.

It is all set up for Lolo Jones to be the sweetheart of the Olympic games.  She has the looks and if she can pull off this gold and get redemption for Beijing, I have a feeling the American public will really embrace her.